The post-festive return to work in the dark days of January is never easy, but this new year is shaping up to be tougher than usual for UK workers. Not only must they brave days of severe cold and ice, but many face the end of post-pandemic hybrid working.

A range of big employers are hauling their teams back to the office, with Amazon issuing the strictest mandate, demanding staff attend in person five days a week.

Such orders are provoking fresh battles between employees and their bosses, who believe staff need to be brought together to foster collaboration, creativity and a sense of belonging.

While the luxury of being able to work remotely is not possible for all jobs, it has increasingly become viewed as a right in the almost five years since Covid lockdowns forced staff to carry out their roles from their dining tables, spare bedrooms or sheds at the bottom of the garden, with many arguing they are just as productive at home.

While Amazon’s return to pre-Covid attendance expectations makes it something of an outlier, it is not alone in prioritising physical presence.

As of 1 January, BT is requiring its 50,000 office-based employees across the UK and several other countries to attend three days a week in what it calls a “three together, two wherever” approach. Workers at the telecoms company have been told that office entry and exit data will be used to monitor attendance.

The accountancy firm PwC is also clamping down on remote working; the Spanish-owned bank Santander is formalising attendance requirements for its 10,000 UK staff; the digital bank Starling has ordered staff back to the office more regularly; and the supermarket chain Asda has made a three-day office week compulsory for thousands of workers at its Leeds and Leicester sites.

The international picture is similar. Some of Germany’s largest employers have also formalised a three-day office regime, including the software company SAP and telecoms firm Deutsche Telekom. The carmaker Volkswagen and lender Deutsche Bank have gone a step further for managers, expecting them to be present four days a week.

Multiple studies suggest that the future of work is flexible, with time split between the office and home or another location, in what has been called “the ‘new normal” by the Office for National Statistics.

The ONS found in its latest survey that hybrid was the standard pattern for more than a quarter (28%) of working adults in Great Britain in autumn 2024. At the same time, working entirely remotely had fallen since 2021, it found.

One of the most frequently reported business reasons for hybrid working was “improved staff wellbeing”, the ONS found, while those who worked from home saved an average of 56 minutes each day by dodging the commute.

“Hybrid working is here, it’s not going away,” said Andrew Mawson, the founder of Advanced Workplace Associates (AWA), a workplace transformation consultancy. “Even though companies are trying to mandate, foolishly in my view, to have their people in the office on a certain number of days, the true reality of it is different.”

The middle of the week has the highest levels of attendance and use of desks in corporate buildings, with Tuesday the most popular day, AWA found. This is a global pattern, according to the consultancy’s most recent hybrid working index, which surveyed 55 offices across 19 countries, representing about 68,000 employees.

Studies have shown that offering hybrid working is also vital for retaining staff, and for attracting new ones, Mawson said. “I have talked to quite a few HR directors who tell me their boards and senior leadership teams are still insistent on getting people into the office, but they are caught in the middle, because they know that if they don’t offer this sort of flexibility to new recruits, they won’t recruit the kind of calibre of person they need.”

UK staff have been slower to return to their desks after the pandemic than their counterparts in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US.

London, in particular, has lagged behind other global cities including Paris and New York, according to recent research from the Centre for Cities thinktank, where workers spent on average 2.7 days a week in the office, attendance levels similar to Toronto and Sydney. It cited the cost, and average length of the commute in and around the UK capital as one of the main reasons for the trend.

Despite this, there has been a “slow but steady increase in both attendance and desk use” in British offices, according to AWA, which tracked a 4% rise in attendance, from 29% to 33%, between July 2022 and September 2024.

The global world of work post-Covid also seems to be moving away from fully remote roles, replaced by jobs that require some time in the office.

Adverts for hybrid jobs increased by almost a third (31%) in 2024 compared with a year earlier, according to research from the international recruitment firm Randstad, while entirely remote roles tumbled by 41%.

“It’s clear that much of the global labour market has settled on a hybrid work arrangement for professionals who can work from home,” said Prem Saripalle, a senior consultant at Randstad Enterprise. “People are likely to leave jobs with return to office mandates for ones that offer greater flexibility and accommodate their personal needs.”

Flexibility is a key demand for office-based workers in Germany, too, according to Dr Dagmar Weßler-Poßberg, a director at economic researchers Prognos, particularly among those with children, who may need to change their workplace at short notice.

“Parents say the need to work from home has to do with work-life balance, and ‘it doesn’t matter whether it is a Monday or a Thursday, if the kindergarten is closed or my child is ill, then I need the flexibility to say that today or tomorrow I will work from home’ – and the majority of companies say this is what they want to facilitate,” she said.

Those organisations that are toughening up their attendance rules may have to prepare for battle in 2025, as workers show their readiness to take action against any rollbacks in flexibility.

In a recent test case, civilian staff employed by the Metropolitan police who are members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union voted to go on strike for the first time after managers upped their office attendance requirement.

The PCS said the change would affect about 2,400 workers who support police officers, and would disproportionately impact women, part-time workers and those with disabilities.

Meanwhile Amazon is finding that turning back the clock is harder than it expected. Several regional offices in the US said this week that their spaces would not be ready by the deadline of 2 January, Business Insider revealed, because there were not enough desks ready for full occupancy. Delays could keep some staff in their current hybrid working patterns until as late as May.